Even as a child I always wanted to eat at the BT Tower restaurant – and it’s not the only time I’ve yearned for something I just can’t have
Apart from a bottle of apple-scented shampoo and a jar of piccalilli I once picked up in a particularly rubbish school tombola, which obviously don’t count, I never, ever win raffles. So when I added my name to the ballot for a table in the revolving restaurant on the 34th floor of the BT Tower, which will celebrate its 50th birthday by re-opening for two weeks this summer, I felt only the tiniest flicker of hope. Would I be one of the 1,400 lucky diners? No, I most definitely would not.
All the same, it had to be done. That sliver of anticipation was enough. I’ve fantasised about eating in the restaurant of the BT Tower for most of my life, which seems rather amazing considering that when it finally closed to the public in 1980 I was only 11 and my first visit to London was still some years in the future. But I knew all about it even as a child: the fact that its famous dining room made one revolution every 22 minutes; that it was operated by Billy Butlin; that the menu included such delights as chicken kiev and scampi; that the tower itself was an official secret, and therefore appeared on no Ordnance Survey map for all that it was 191 metres high and built of concrete and steel. What, I used to wonder, was a mere Berni Inn beside this epicentre of sophistication and glamour? It was nothing, that’s what, and all the Irish coffees in the world wouldn’t ever change that.
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